So I have a pretty decent job on a more than good wage working for a larger company... I have my own team and get a good bit of responsibility with the role..... But the culture outside of my team is non existent....business is a mess and everything is a war to get anything done... I wish I could just take my team and do my own thing.... So.....

An old colleague and a great friend wants us to do our own thing... The money looks good... There is great demand... She is already doing it and making great money and turning down work and wants an equal partner in the business idea.. Equal equity split...

.... Why am I so worried about leaving a job I don't really have much loyalty too? Ironically the friend wanting me to go do our own thing with hired me here and got me promoted!

I want to go do it but something is keeping me here and I don't know what.... Am I just making excuses not to go?

Am I being rational wanting to stay or tricked of this false security a big firm offers?

Thoughts in the comments plz

So apple event today was 2 hours long to say....

MOAR screen for MOAR dollar?! 💵💵😂

The only feature I want is the fall detection for when I face-palm now....

Spends 5 days working from home at my desk.... Stressful week...

Spends weekend playing diablo 3 with son at same desk.... Relaxing...

Wife says I need to get out more.... *looks outside* raining...

Devrant algorithm on point......

Just a 60 year old teachers desk and some awesome screens....MacBook pro with 3 external for work with a gaming rig when 5.30 rolls around....

So I'm interested in building a Raspberry Pi stack at home to continue securing and adding my smart home capabilities, 👍

Have ideas for 2/3 but what else could I look to add?

1. Pi. Hole with cloudflared argo proxy for all DNS
2. Home Automation server
3. IPS / IDS like Bro or snort? Or firewall like pfsense?
4. Log server with Splunk agent from other pi's and router....
5. What else?

Ideas in the comments

After a nightmare weekend where moving my 80 year old desk caused the wood to completely split and almost broke my computer and screens in the process..... I felt physically sick.....

Somehow I became a carpenter for the day and rebuilt and resized my desk to make it better then ever.....

Couldn't be happier with the final result tbh!

Check! Mic check!

So out shopping on a Saturday with the other half and 12yo son.... He clearly is wise before his years when he asks

"why do we always get dragged around all of the shops mum wants too go and we have to sit there waiting while if we want to go anywhere she complains and we can't?"

Hate to generalise but he's already figured out what most shopping trips in married life are!

Turned up on customer site yesterday to do a says SME work for them like I have done every week for last 3 months..

As I walk in they took a decision 15 mins earlier to power off the platform I'm working on to do a backup ( on a big data platform?) and its down till 13. 30...

Irony? The minute they finally let me turn it on New data arrives in the platform so their backup is out of date and they wouldn't need backups if they'd followed my original design and distributed it over two data centres....

Oh and they 'forgot' I was coming so there was little / nothing to do for the rest of the day either

Clients can be a PITA but I can't really complain.... Easy day though!

My type of train station.... Especially when my trains at platform 0 🚉

Is it just me... Or is there like two different scrolling behaviours in the app on android? When I've for the blue theme with white text it seems really gittery when I'm first scrolling down rant comments or the main rants feed.. Then about halfway down it goes much smoother... No idea why...

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

Quiet Sunday and the family are out.... Fancy just doing a little PoC and seeing if I can create a new bit of functionality in my app..... Seems like a simple bit of work I could do in an hour...

Its been two hours and my laptop test environment keeps failing the setup for no apparent reason....

Family gonna be back in the hour and still debugging why the lab stopped working...

Don't try and fix parts of the code that isn't 'broken' in the clients eyes.... You'll spend hours fixing something they'll neither appreciate or understand

Tech event in Prague next week.... Chance to geek out by day and by night for a few days.... Question is... Should I enter the hackathon or just take it easy?

When I thought things couldn't get crazier that my vmware to win chrome mess.....

Doing an upgrade today when I have to VPN in from my mac to access a Web based secret server to get onto another VPN so I can RDP onto a Windows bastion host to then RDP to client windows servers within the RDP and from those hosts need to use putty to ssh into Linux servers to do the admin activities......

Now I'm obviously all for security but seriously VPN to RDP to RDP to ssh is just a bit mental......

But all of the SSL certs between each env is self signed anyhow......

9pm I REALLY needed to get some work done... Head was dropping like a nodding dog at my laptop... Gave up and went to bed.... Now its after 2am and I've been watching YouTube for 5 hours and still awake.... Just what even....

When you finally have some servers racked and configured in VMware to build a lab environment for the team....

But to access VMware you need to run citrix receiver from a mac to launch Chrome on Windows to access the VMware ESX Web UI but only on the HTML5 version as Flash doesn't work....

Now to spin up virtual machines that you can only upload via ova images but not locally cos that tries to show you the Windows citrix local files....

Do I even dare ask if I can access this via API so I can actually provision this with Ansible like I want too?!

How do people work in coffee shops for the day but not lose their seat when they inevitably need the toilet?!

Keep buying coffee to stay in the shop causing me to pack up at least 3 times today and move to a different corner....

A contractor at my old job was doing a development role and was constantly annoyed and the idiotic design decisions going into the website backend we were developing 🙄😒

When he decided enough was enough he could have easily written a really snarky email but instead he wrote the most sincere and professional email to his boss and the director thanking them profusely for the opportunity and hopes he would be welcome for future work with the business....👍

He was a really good Dev and the email made the bosses super happy thanking him so much and how much of a shame it was he was going....😍

He bcc'd me on the mail and when he handed his computer in he told me to open the email and highlight in full....👌

At the end of every line in white text was 'Go Fuck yourself' or 'Zero fucks given'

The bosses never realised... And I know he's been back there about 4 months now..... But shhh 😭

Why not have a game of DevSecOpoly? Doing DevOps and Security right!

Spent the weekend geeking out getting my head around a proper Docker based environment for my development env at home and for the team... 90% done and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't start my Splunk instance up.... I'd set the default logging to Splunk.... Chicken & Egg probs!

But how awesome is docker with portainer and app templates eh?!

Goals for the next 100 weeks eh?
- Teach my 8yo and 11yo to be awesome java coders
- Take my 2yo to her first day at school
- Grow my department in work to over 40 people worldwide
- Start and finish my Masters degree in Big Data*
- Speak at 5 major international conferences (1000+ ppl)

Team are getting into using Machine learning for anomalous behaviour detection for authentication and traffic behaviour... It's so interesting and another useful tool in our security arsenal

Wowza..... Security certifications get expensive! Gonna have to spend half the week writing one hell of a business case for the certs my team needs!

I work in big data and security analytics... So naturally I am a very detail oriented and analytical person.... Something that I constantly get told off about for 'over analysing' every personal situation.... Especially by my wife!

Today she was chatting to our best friend on WhatsApp who's been travelling Europe for 6 months seeing how life is etc... At the end of the conversation I point out he never once told her where he was and avoided the questions.... And that I was sure he was gonna turn up tonight....

She tells me I'm over analysing and full of it as she's in Spain.... Not even an hour later he walked through our front door and we are in the pub having an awesome catch up!

Who said I'm over analytical! More like right!?

So we've had a new guy on our team for over 6 months now... Been training him up doing shadowing.... Training courses... Study time... The works...

He didn't have the specific skills for our team but had 2 degrees, lectured at uni... Seems VERY smart......

Yet he still has barely grasped the basics..... When experienced people talk about challenges they've had he tries to suggest what they do... Constantly raising 'problems' with ways of working but offers no solutions and never collaborates on how we can fix it......

He avoids doing practical learning and thinks he can learn the job from reading docs... .. Sigh....

Gone almost as far as doing daily check ups on what he's actually doing to make sure he's progressing..... Tough one to crack!

Questions more then a rant...

I've moved from being a lead on imploring DevOps and Agile practices in a large Telco to now working for a security consultancy... The team I'm with are s*** hot when it comes to SecOps (which is why I changed jobs) and I've been hired to he the automation and working practice expert on the team. Already got some of them learning Ansible which is a great start!

I've got delivery now being pushed to Git and all client work being tracked in Jira and properly documented and collaborated through HipChat and other CI tools on the way....

My question is this... Does anyone have some awesome resources to teach people Git, Jira, Jenkins, etc. quickly without forking or branching out on expensive training? Focus on being a technical but consultative team. Ideally just wanna pull some awesome guides and make. My own commits on them for the team... Please fire a story or epic away!

Dropped my youngest off at the childminder today and her husband asked me what I'm doing for a job now
.. Explained its security and data science... His reply was to ask if I can setup a printer....